Five Ways Apple Might Become a Better Company Without Steve Jobs

Fourteen years after he returned to the company he co-founded, Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO this week. While we wish the turtlenecked one good luck and good health, we think his departure could, in fact, make Apple a better—and especially nicer—company.

Steve Jobs has officially resigned as CEO of Apple, the company that he co-founded, was famously ousted from, then returned to and steered from near-extinction into largest and most influential technology company in the world. Jobs is a brilliant man and an incredible leader. He has done more than any other person in the last decade to force technological progress. And the fact that his career is being cut short by health concerns is a tragedy for both him and the technology industry as a whole. But now Apple must move on without him. Now I'm not going to be the first idiot tech commentator to argue that, with Jobs gone, Apple will be a more profitable or successful company. But it is possible that, now that its famous leader is stepping aside, Apple might well become a nicer company.

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Apple is one of those rare businesses that operates as a cult of personality (a la the early days of the Edison Electric Light Company and Ford), and it has been unique in its ability to execute the will and strategy of its visionary CEO—in fact, one might argue that the structure of Apple is explicitly designed to do so. Apple the company is the most perfect corporate extension of its leader's personality that has ever been created. Both the man and the company are visionary, driven, bold, brave, inventive, smart and supremely confident. Both entities are also sometime accused of being megalomaniacal, paranoid, mercurial, difficult and occasionally vindictive.

There is no doubt that Apple's current products and pipeline of upcoming products is strong enough and deep enough to maintain the company's influence and profitability for years to come, and I don't expect to see any immediate changes in its business policies. But Apple without Jobs is bound to become less like an autocracy and more like a corporation, which means that the company will become more bound to the will of investors and the public than to the unyielding vision of its leader. Ultimately, that may cause problems for Apple's products and its core business, but it is such a well-run company that I expect the first effects of Jobs' departure will for Apple to shed some of his, and by extension, the company's most polarizing qualities. Why? Because without Jobs, some of those things just won't be necessary, and without Jobs, neither the business community nor the public at large will stand for it. Let's take a look at some of the ways that Apple could be-—and may soon be—a better company.

1. Become Less Secretive

This is, of course, a tough one to see the Cupertino crowd abandoning, but the veil of secrecy has already been lifting a bit. The aura of mystery surrounding Apple's upcoming products is part of its mystique. But is anybody really going to be surprised when a new iPhone that is thinner and more capable comes out this fall? Apple introduced the concept of the phone that is all screen, which means the interface is all software. And Apple also introduced the concept of mobile devices that run third-party apps. This means that long before Apple releases a new device, the company must unveil the upgraded operating system to developers. So by the time the device comes out, we already know most of what it will do. Likewise, with its computers, Apple now routinely lets out advance information about OS upgrades.

The truth is, as Apple has evolved an ecosystem that requires working with outside developers to make the most of its products, it must be more open about upcoming products. And to be honest, it's not even clear that Apple's secrecy gives them any tangible business advantage. For instance, the entire tech industry knew for years that Apple was working on a tablet computer, and even after it was officially launched, it took competitors a year and a half to produce a comparable competing device, and by then Apple was already onto version two.

2. Play Nicer With Your Own Business Partners

Steve Jobs has always been demanding, difficult and uncompromising with his colleagues, which has served the company well and helped it create incredible products. Apple has also been demanding, difficult and uncompromising with its business partners, which has not necessarily served the company well and has definitely hampered some of their products. There's the famous war with Adobe over Flash. There's also a lawsuit against Apple for alleged collusion with book publishers.

The company is notoriously unpredictable with its developers, rejecting apps from the iOS App store with only vague guidance on how to change them for resubmission. Apple also routinely rejects app developers for duplicating functionality present in the operating system of the company's devices, then punishes other developers who extend the capabilities of those devices by folding the functionality of their apps into OS updates. The iOS 5 update stole ideas from such influential apps as GroupMe, Instapaper, Boxcar, Remember the Milk and Wi-Fi Sync. While I doubt that Apple will lower its standards for app quality now that Jobs is gone, this isn't just about quality. It's also about allowing developers to innovate in ways that benefit consumers. Apple might be a bit less abrasive, and a bit more welcoming of outsiders' good ideas, under the stewardship of new CEO Tim Cook.

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3. Be Less Vindictive

This is the flip side of the secrecy problem. Steve Jobs has a long history of impatience with anyone who meddles with his plans. But he also has a weird history of lashing out at individuals who annoy him, even developers and customers who email him directly. And by extension, Apple the company has a history of freezing out partners and even journalists it doesn't like.

The most egregious example was Apple's war with the tech blog Gizmodo over a leak of the iPhone 4, when editors at Giz got a hold of a prototype before launch and reported vigorously on it. The result was a surge of interest in the phone, which went on to become a blockbuster. Rather than basking in all of the free attention and publicity, Apple turned to law enforcement to go after Giz editors. This is a publication that has a history of glowing endorsements and fanboy love of Apple's products—but to this day, it has been blacklisted by Apple PR and barred from Apple events. This may seem like a simple squabble between trouble-making tech bloggers and a secretive megacorporation, but this sort of thing indirectly impacts consumers. When a company doles out information only to the most cooperative press and stonewalls anyone who irritates them, then the customer is ultimately starved of the honest, critical assessments of products that are essential to buying decisions.

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4. Be More Generous

This is perhaps the most surprising quality of both Jobs and Apple. There's no law saying you have to give your money away, but the world's most respected CEO (who is worth $8.3 billion) ran a feel-good company worth $343 billion, yet both are essentially philanthropic non-entities. Despite public pressure, Jobs still has not signed onto Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's famous Giving Pledge, in which 40 of the world's wealthiest people, including Michael Bloomberg, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg, have agreed to give away the majority of their money to charity.

And Jobs' lack of interest in charity has translated directly to corporate behavior at Apple. According to a 2008 article in Fortune, one of Steve Jobs' first acts upon returning to Apple in 1997 was to cancel all of Apple's philanthropic programs as a cost-saving measure. Yet as of the writing of the Fortune piece, none of those programs had resumed. More recently, philanthropic organizations have criticized Apple for the company's refusal to let charities solicit donations through iOS devices. That said, retirement had a way of bringing the best out of Bill Gates, who morphed from one of the most ruthless businessmen in history to one of the most generous. Maybe Steve and Apple will follow suit.

5. Stop Being So Full of Yourself

Recently, I purchased a MacBook Pro for a Popular Mechanics test at one of Apple's famously austere and beautiful retail shops. On my way out of the store, one of the fresh-faced young employees saw the computer in my hands, smiled and said "Congratulations!" Wait a second. You're congratulating me for buying one of your products as if I had earned the right to do it. Are you kidding? How about showing some gratitude to a customer who just forked over a thousand bucks?

Whatever you think of Apple's products, the cult of "specialness" surrounding the company that served it quite well when it was a boutique manufacturer is positively cloying now that it is a mass-market technology company. Employees clap for you when you walk out with an iPhone on launch day. The company's ads describe its own products with words like "magical" and "revolutionary." While these descriptors may be true, it sounds a lot different when you're saying it about yourself. This type of behavior goes all the way up to the top. At the launch of the iPad, when Jobs was asked if Apple does any customer research, he responded that the company doesn't do customer research. "It's not the customer's job to figure out what they want," he said.

That type of instinctive ability to know your customers better then they know themselves is, of course, part of the secret of Apple's success, but it also means that things that customers routinely ask for ("How about a few more USB ports on my MacBook, please?" "C'mon, no expandable storage on any iOS devices?") are routinely ignored. The departure of Steve Jobs is also presumably the departure of Jobsian self-assuredness. I don't see Apple instantly setting up a Customer Research department, but I would be delighted if it became a bit more responsive to customer concerns—and maybe drop the attitude.

Even if Apple does adopt all of these fixes, maintains their commitment to quality, still comes up with stunning innovations and manages to become even more dreamy without Steve, I'm still going to miss having him run the company. He is a difficult genius and an erratic character, but there's a reason all of us in the tech press felt privileged to be at his keynote speeches and product launches. When you watched him on the stage, you were witnessing a man in charge of a technology company who was truly in love with the creations he produced—a dreamer who wanted cool stuff so badly that he literally willed it into being. Now the rest of us will have to hope that enough of Jobs' DNA is left in the company to keep the dream alive.